Salvaging Electronic Components

I've got a nice big pile of electronics here that have lots of parts in them today I'm going to show you just how easy it is to salvage some of those parts welcome to hack a week well we might not get as brute force as the old sledgehammer but what we will use is some D soldering aids and some know-how and screwdrivers and such to get inside these things and pull out some components there's lots of stuff that can be salvaged at electronics all over the place anywhere you find them grab them if you're into the Hobby bring them home and tear them apart pull parts off from old circuit boards I do it all the time I've salvaged plenty of stuff in fact that's how I got my start playing around with electronics was finding old ones and pulling them apart and figuring out how to use the component so let's see what we've got here this is a pretty cool pile of stuff it's a pretty broad variety of things there's a signal generator right here an audio generator it doesn't work I just want to open that up and see what's going on with it I recently got some more vintage electronics goodies I got some old Heathkit stuff which is kind of cool in fact somewhere back there is that Heathkit analog scope we're going to tear into some time soon so what have I got I have in the top here I've got a digital volt foam milli ammeter how's that for a mouthful and who made this Kelly a resistor chart on the top Heathkit it's a model EF 2 and well the LED driver or the LEDs themselves pretty much gone away hardly any of the elements light up when I plug it in but they give you a little more of a close-up of what's going on with that one it's kind of cool one of the early ones I remember in the 70s hanging out in some music stores that actually did airs in the bag sold electronics and I would go hang out with some of the techies and blunt the hell out of them and some of those guys had digital meters upon their workbench like this and that was that was really cool I mean you were you were pretty awesome to have had a digital volt omen meter back in the 70s so we're going to open that up just to see what's going on inside it same thing with the audio signal generator then I've got a couple of old cassette mechanisms here I'll show you some goodies on these that can be salvaged for all kinds of things I mean it's a mechanical device so there's little mechanical bits that can be very handy repurposed into something else Roomba vacuum cleaners I don't have a hold on here but as you know from my videos if you've watched him before there's lots of stuff I built in fact last week little motor that drove that the widget that made the tremolo work was a Roomba vacuum motor a little teeny one there's sensors in these things there's a main board that has a nice eight bridge that can be tapped into motors all kinds of stuff like we get back into like some of the old 70s 80s electronics the ones that were not picking place these were actually put in there and soldered in place by somebody on assembly line maybe some of it was automated I'm not sure but anyway this is all stuff that can be D soldered and reused capacitors transistors resistors I pull resistors out of these boards a lot some of the really oddball ones that I don't have look in the book in the in the drawers this thing down the bottom of everything here is pioneer audio video amplifier and went bad is probably in the power supply system it does absolutely nothing when you turn it on and the fuses are all okay and the power supply is assuming that it's somewhere around the transformer perhaps went that it was it was written pretty hard and put away wet let's put it that way maybe even had a beer or two spilled it in it it's time who knows but we'll get in there and see what kind of things we can salvage so enough of this yackety-yak let's get out the screwdrivers and the pry bars and get to work so first up is the Heathkit digital volt ohm milli ammeter and you know it's wishing I had some leads for this thing it's got the guy's name on here we used to own it that's pretty wild Don dan dan ray how about that what's this oh look test leads yeah that's pretty cool so back to the front let's hook up those test leads and see what you get this thing I think the I think the analog readout as simple as it is does work so let's see here let's put it on this is the ranges right here and then these are the functions let's put it on DC volts 0 to 20 scale and let's check a 9-volt battery out and see what we get see if anything comes up on the analog scale no it just doesn't seem to be doing much of anything you try twisting some dials is tricky holding all this together that's in the off position um yeah I don't know well anyway let's tear it apart so how does it come apart well what you do first is you look at the outer case and you think well how was that held on let's look around pretty simple on this one there's a screw there one here on each side same thing as going on it looks like the one here is slotted so that if you remove this and only loosen this one you can actually slide the top cover forward and off out of here make sure it's unplugged don't want to work on things when they're plugged in unless of course you're troubleshooting and you know what the hell you're doing okay Wow there are some big-ass batteries in here look at that big old decels oh that's not gonna be pretty when we get those out of the way wow these are these are the agent what the hell are these look at this rechargeable heavy-duty industrial battery almost the last time you saw one of those like never I've never seen these naik ads now there's a dead technology well at least they didn't leak all over the place that's the nice thing about the mic ads I suppose but I could put decels in here just regular D cells and it would work perma cell well maybe not so much huh not forever anyway yeah we can put some other D cells in there at some point doesn't look too terrible so this I'm not going to tear apart or do anything with just yet because I want to put batteries in it and just see if I can make it work it would be pretty cool to have this thing up on the shelf as a usable piece of test equipment but anyway I wanted to open it up and just show you some 70s technology of what made up a digital volt home milliamp meter and see what's in there there's some transistors just the usual plethora of stuff there is one big old Texas Instruments probably an EEPROM right there I don't know enough to look that one up maybe we'll dig up the numbers and go searching around the internet got some switches over here and of course the battery packs in the backers the transformer for the whole thing all right well let's put that back together and move on old cassette deck mechanisms these are pretty cool this one I might make an Echoplex out of sometimes that'll make an eagle project still works okay electric motors in these belts small belt drives fly wheels lots of Springs usually that's pretty neat good source for Springs this is an older one mostly gutted but there's a motor there these motors are really well built - they're not real high torque but they are made to just run and run and run so if you had something where you wanted to run a motor constantly that'd be the one to use more Springs pulleys things like that pieces of metal lots of screws so that's what that stuff's good for next up Roomba stuff these are the motors out of the Roomba vacuum cleaners very cool items for doing robotics and such lots of things in the room but that you can salvage there's some infrared sensors mounted in this bar and the front really cool gear motors and a main board that's really neat and easy to hack into you've got 2 H bridges here and here to drive the motors I hooked up via email with one of the techs who used to work at iRobot and help develop the early ones and he said that these H bridges and their over current resistors that are in there are capable of driving more than just a single motor per set because I was driving two motors per set so just FYI you can really drive the hell out of this board and there is a project page of how to hotwire into this and utilize those H bridges on hekawis comm just go on there and search Roomba you'll find all kinds of stuff here we've got a technology that's been around for 40 years and more just good old PCBs with discrete components mounted up on them pretty easy to see what the values are and each one of them you can look up the number check out the data sheets you may be able to cross-reference and you can salvage all this stuff and it's also readily available out there if you just look around a bit find some old electronics hang on to the stuff tear it down and salvage the goodies off from it right now I'm going to show you how to the solder components off from a board like this so let's say you know I'm searching around looking for the resistor I want and there's one right there we'll do an easy one right here on the corner and what I need to do is D solder it from the board I need to heat up those two spots of solder and basically get them off from the board somehow well there's a thing you can use for that it's a desoldering braid there you go and it's just braided copper that's really all it is it's just a little filament of braided copper it kind of reminds me of the old school slot car racer brushes that would rub against the track but that's a whole different story there so how you use this stuff is you put it on to the solder that you want to wick onto the copper and then you take a hot soldering iron and hold it on there and when it gets hot enough to melt that solder it will wick its way up Smythe if they're hand tools loose here it'll wick on to the desoldering braid and take away most of the solder that's on that little pad and then you can just basically lift out the component if you get enough of it off so most of that one's gone now I'll do the one next to it still got a bit on it so once I get that part done I usually just flip it over and see if I can heat it up and just give it a wiggle out with my fingers it gets pretty hot it's amazing how frigging hot a little tiny component can get and still survive so that's one way to get a component off a board like this another way is with a D soldering tool it's called a solder sucker it's basically a soldering iron with the bulb up there and a tip that has a little teeny hole in it that will suck up the solder I just love pronouncing solder the right way because it is derived from word solid folks isn't to make solid so you squeeze the bulb once you get it hot and scoop suck it up and it just takes it right off the board it's that easy really easy so let's try that out on that big capacitor right there looks like there's gonna be a lead probably right there and right there so let's get this one first we'll squeeze the bulb heat up that little pad of solder and let go and we just sucked it all right up squeeze the bulb again this one's got a lot on it on this spot like take a bit of time to really heat it and melt it there we go and maybe just a little more heat and that should come out of there there we go one salvaged what is this thing four hundred and seventy micro farad at 16 volts electrolytic capacitor now let's see what's up with this signal generator sign and square wave signal generator we need to pull the front cover off it looks like okay that's all the screws well well it looks like we have some old paper wound capacitors in here none of them look like they've been leaking I don't know if that's the problem or not but let's flip it over this thing is tube driven and you know this somebody took the time to actually label on the chassis just what type of tube goes where and it's basically an oscillator circuit that's just calibrated and tuned hmm well I am going to plug this in and be careful not to touch anything anything inside and turn it on you can see the pilot light right there lit up just want to make sure all the tubes are actually working okay the heaters anyway that lets me know that the power supply is probably ok Salette parts all right I noticed something funny on the bottom there's actually a lamp there's a lamp underneath on the bottom right there what is up with that do you suppose so I've got a speaker setup here let's see got the lm386 amplifier going so there's my sign wave square wave really don't think it should be fluctuating like turns out the thing is working okay Oh let's see that's on the B scale which would be 200 to 2,000 Hertz this is too much fun got the lm386 amp turns out this thing does work after all that little bulb on the bottom I tighten it up I've got output from the thing now I don't know that's strange this is the amplitude now and this is the the different bands right now I'm on the B band and I met about seven or eight hundred Hertz the be ban goes from 200 Hertz to 2,000 and then we can go to see which goes from mm all the way up to 20 K you can test your own hearing let's see can I still here 15 yeah I can still hear 15 K that's pretty little pretty gnarly I'm going to crank it up all the way see if it'll pick up on the YouTube video and we're coming back down in the scale probably around 14 13 is ten thousand nine thousand eight seven six five four three where I'm told a baby's cries centered and there's 20 can't hear that you should bring the dogs in and see what they do with the higher frequencies a yeah then we can go to this ridiculous other scale from 20 K to 200 K I'm actually putting out an ultrasonic wave form right now that none of us can hear wow this is down in the lowest there's 20 20 times a second that's a sine wave let's listen to a square wave you hey check this out I was about to hook us up to the oscilloscope just give a listen here I'm not even plugging these into the leads but if I get them close to the leads it's actually sending that enough of RF signal I guess picking it up through the wire there that's it's going through the air folks that's cool well let's see what happens when we connect it up to the scope I've got the leads to the amplifier just laying near the leads to the scope that's why you can still hear it just a little bit and you can see the waveform on the scope it's a sine wave it looks a little square on the top and bottom that when I switch to square wave you see that those up and down transitions are pretty much gone so it's a sine wave that in that it's ramping up and down let's see if we can figure out that high frequency ultrasonics tough well there it is 200,000 Hertz and I have to go all the way down to a to microsecond sweep to get it to show up Wildman well there you can really see the structure of the waveform pretty fun stuff well that was full I think I'll be keeping this thing just as it is clean junk out of it here and put it all back together that's a handy piece of test equipment for audio stuff now we move on to the big old stereo stuff most of these it's going to be some screws around the back maybe one or two on the side and then the top will come off so what's inside well there's the amplifier section the FM radio section a preamp section and the power supply there's the transformer that's what I suspect went bad on this unit because there's nothing getting to the power supply whatsoever the board over here is just dead dead there's no blown fuses so more than likely a bad transformer these are the two amplifiers left and right channels and it's a bunch of components all put together on a slab in there and then potted and sealed all up and that technology has been around probably since the the 70s 80s needs to be called STK chips they were a little bit smaller than that and they used them in home stereo amplifiers for a long long time this hasn't got as many components going on like the other circuit board that you saw partly because of these chips are here but there's still lots of things on here transistors I see all kinds of resistors there's fuse holders lots of wiring that you can salvage the wiring is always really handy to keep there's some RCA jacks back here are some speaker banana plugs in jacks those are handy there's 110 volt cord there's all kinds of screws there's of course the sheet metal and the little bits like that and if you just save this stuff and stick it in a drawer then your imagination will come up with what to do with it at some point trust me there you go there's electronics to be salvaged all over the place and not only just the electronics some of the plastic bits the pieces of metal heat sinks out of old computer towers these are kind of handy I used it for my desoldering sucker there during this video and as an artist there's all kinds of things you can pull out of all these components and use and get creative with to sculpt with and using your three-dimensional art I suppose but the point being is you can have a lot of fun playing around with electronics and design and tinkering and inventing and not have to go spend lots of money on resources it's all over the place just look for people throwing away electronics scoop them up take them home be careful with them watch out for some capacitors they may still be charged if you see a great big one like that the ones that are inside metal cans like the ones in microwaves watch out for those will knock you on your ass some of them could be potentially lethal so be careful when you get in there and start poking around with things and never do it when it's plugged in to the wall ever so I guess that about wraps it up this week for those of you hoping there would have been a cb750 cafe bike whatever this week well too bad it's going to happen but it's too damn cold in my garage right now it's like 30 degrees out there I can't really heat it up so when it gets a little warmer one of these weekend's I'm going to get everything down off the shelves look it all over and get started on a video and until then there's uh there's a lot of a lot of yep that's that's what there's a lot of is very that

Channel: HackaweekTV

Views: 362,385

Keywords: electronics, transistor, resistor, capacitor, motor, springs, screws, diy, salvage, solder, desolder, tear down, take apart, hackaweek, Computer, robot, roomba, oscilloscope, signal generator, tubes

Id: K-2ojZNsz4U

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2014